Elizabeth Warren announces candidacy for Senate

Elizabeth Warren:

Boston, Ma - Elizabeth Warren, a consumer advocate known for standing up to big banks and financial institutions to fight for middle class families, today (9/14) announced she is running for the United States Senate from Massachusetts, beginning her day greeting early morning commuters at a MBTA station in Boston.

“And the reason is straightforward,” Warren said in video released this morning on www.elizabethwarren.com/announcement. ”Middle class families have been chipped at, hacked at, squeezed and hammered for a generation now, and I don’t think Washington gets it.”

“Washington is rigged for big corporations,” Warren continued. “A big company, like GE, pays nothing in taxes, and we’re asking college students to take on even more debt to get an education? We’re telling seniors they may need to learn to live on less? It isn’t right, and it’s the reason I’m running.”

“We have a chance to help rebuild America’s middle class. We have a chance to put Washington on the side of families. We can do this together,” Warren says in her announcement video. Warren is meeting with working men and women at stops across the state today and tomorrow, including visits to Boston, New Bedford, Framingham, Worcester, Springfield, Lowell, and Gloucester.

Warren describes her family as living “on the ragged edge of the middle class” when she was growing up. She was the first in her family to graduate college and became a public school teacher. After graduating law school, Elizabeth practiced law from her living room but soon returned to teaching, becoming an expert on bankruptcy and the financial pressures facing the middle class.

After the 2008 financial crisis, Elizabeth led the panel created by Congress to examine how the bank bailout money was being spent. She is widely credited for the original thinking, political courage, and relentless persistence that led to the creation of a new consumer financial protection agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Elizabeth was in charge of setting up the agency, building the foundation to hold accountable even trillion-dollar financial institutions and to protect consumers from financial traps often hidden in mortgages, credit cards and other financial products.

Elizabeth and her husband, Bruce Mann, have been married for 31 years. In addition to two children, Elizabeth and Bruce now have three grandchildren.